New on the ITNewb.com site today there's a tutorial looking at making your forms a bit more "spam free" without resorting to CAPTCHA images.

Most anti-spam methods used by websites today are annoying at best. They use impossible-to-read captcha images, or they make users jump through some kind of hoop to get the email address instead of just clicking on it. This can mean lost sales and opportunities for you, because each hurdle turns away more users.

The trick uses some CSS and Javascript to hide a form field (display:none) and check on the submit to ensure that it's empty. The email address is the output of a Javascript document.write() as well, preventing those pulling the information off of your site without Javascript support (like some automated tools) to miss it completely.